Robert Glasper Wants Jazz to Matter

Think about jazz. Close your eyes, and the images, they're all in black and white. Miles, Monk, Bird, 'Trane. Great, but dead. Robert Glasper argues for living color. The pianist plays jazz in the present tense, which means hip-hop in the vocabulary.

His Double Booked album is divided between sets by his more traditional Robert Glasper Trio and the genre taffy pull that is the Robert Glasper Experiment. Each half is introduced by voice mail from, respectively, Spike Lee composer Terence Blanchard and the Roots' ?uestlove, inquiring into the (true) story of Glasper having two gigs booked at major jazz clubs on the same night.

"I am one of the only cats who is in both worlds, like for real. For real, for real," Glasper says. "If you come to my show, you'll see Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Mos Def, Common ... but since they say, 'The cat can play,' I get a huge jazz audience at the same time."

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That hip-hop could reanimate jazz isn't a new idea. It was a prevailing theory in the nineties, fostered by A Tribe Called Quest and projects like Jazzmatazz from Gang Starr's MC Guru. But that's all that happened: projects.

For Glasper, who got into A Tribe Called Quest as a jazz kid at a performing-arts high school in Houston and later fell in with the East Coast hip-hop intelligentsia while on music scholarship in New York, "It's like my everyday thing." Double Booked succeeds because he's not trying to be groundbreaking, just real. "This isn't like the ultimate hip-hop-meets-jazz record," he explains. "If you listen to it, there's really only three minutes' worth of hardcore hip-hop beats going on." But for a record that both recalls Linus and Lucy ice-skating to Vince Guaraldi and deconstructs keyboard funk, the underlying rhythmic pulse ties it together.

"I think what I'm doing is right in line with where it's supposed to be," he continues. "I'm playing what's fresh, what's now. It's not even of the future; it's now, but because jazz is so caught up with the past, now seems far ahead."

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